by David Archer
“I’m going to show you in a minute,” he said. “I called Alfie and told him about your car getting blown up, and after I got him down off the ceiling, I asked him how to prevent it happening again. He told me about these little gizmos. They’re a combination of motion sensors and micro cameras. If something moves the car or gets in front of one of these things, it’ll record video and send it to your phone.” He placed the last one, and then took my phone from me. He fiddled around with it for a minute, downloading some special app, and then handed it back. “Now, watch.”
He got down on his knees and stuck his arm up underneath the car, and my phone made a funny noise. I looked down at it and saw a video of his arm and hand moving around.
“Hey, that’s cool,” I said. “So, if somebody tries to put a bomb on my new car…”
“The app will tell you something is up, and you’ll get a video of whoever is messing with it. The app records the video so you can look at it again later, or show it to the police. They cost a pretty penny, but a whole lot less than a funeral. Yours, or some innocent bystander’s.”
I looked at Dex, and suddenly got this overwhelming feeling. I wasn’t about to put a label on it, but it meant I wanted to hold him close and kiss him, right then and there.
So I did.
NINE
Since I wanted to celebrate buying my new car, I convinced Dex to let me take us out for dinner. It was interesting, watching him sit in the passenger seat of my new Mustang. He was trying to see everything going on in the car at once, and he finally shook his head.
“Way too much technology in here for me,” he said. “I have to deal with all that at work. Give me my old school hot rod.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Tell you what, I’ll let you drive home. We’ll see how you feel, then.”
After dinner, I honored my promise and let Dex drive the GT back home. He showed me some things I hadn’t already discovered, like how to use the paddle shifters and the built-in apps that keep track of just about everything the car does. If my new car ever got stolen and recovered, its onboard computer would be able to tell me exactly where it was taken, how long it stayed there, and how much fuel it used. It actually recorded a lot more information than that, but I was quite impressed.
Dex figured out how to set the garage door opener when we got back home, and pulled the car inside for me. It was a little bigger than the Kia, so I was going to have to move some things around to make it fit better. We managed to get out of the car and into the house, though, and finished our celebration in a more private way.
With all the excitement over finding Marsha in the dumpster, I had completely forgotten about getting the utilities taken care of in my office, so that was going to be my mission for the following day. Luckily, it turned out that only the telephone guy had needed to get inside, to hook up the phones and internet router. By the time I arrived at eight, I had already received emails telling me that the electricity and water had been transferred to my name, and I was all set.
Now, I needed to think about getting the word out. I set up the computer on my desk and googled for sign companies, then, not sure about trusting my cell phone, I used my new office phone to call one and arranged to have a sign done on the big glass window at the front of the building. “Cassie McGraw—Abuse Counselor.” I would add “and Private Investigator” once I got my own license.
A call to a local print shop took care of ordering business cards, letterhead stationery, and such, and then I called the cloud company that had provided services for St. Mary’s and asked to speak to a sales representative.
“Hamilton Pro-Cloud,” said a voice. “This is Maggie, how can I help you today?”
“Maggie, my name is Cassie McGraw,” I said. “I need to set up an account for client files and business records.”
“Hi, Cassie,” Maggie said. “That’s great, I’ll be glad to help. First, can you tell me how you heard about us?”
“Yeah, that’s easy. I worked for St. Mary’s Outreach, and I know that they use your services. I decided to call you because I’m familiar with them, and how to use them.”
“Okay, great. Now, I should tell you that the company was recently purchased by a new owner, but it shouldn’t affect the way we operate, or how the software works or anything. It’s all still the same, but we’ve just been a local service company for the last several years, and Mr. Hamilton decided it was time to sell it and retire. It’s all still going through the legal stuff, but we’ll probably be changing our name pretty soon. We’ll still offer the same great service, though.”
“That’s good enough for me,” I said. “I just didn’t want to have to start all over and learn a new system.”
“Well, okay then, let’s get started.”
I arranged the same kind of backup St. Mary’s had used, then used the computer to log into their old account and download all of my client files. A moment later, they were backed up in my own new account, and I started calling each client to let them know that I was open and available.
That led me into a whole new world of problems. Telling these women that I had set up my own private practice made them think I was going to charge them for my services, so I learned quickly to make sure I explained that there was no fee involved before I even mentioned setting up my own office. All but two of them thanked me for letting them know, and I had three appointments set for that afternoon by the time I got done.
The door had one of those electronic chimes on it, and I heard it go off as someone came in. My first thought, naturally, was that the bomber had realized I was there alone and decided to make his play. I got quietly out of my chair and reached behind my back to get my hand on the grip of my pistol, then quickly opened my office door and stepped out into the hall.
Detective Pennington stood there, and Alicia Perkins was with him.
I let go of the gun and smiled. “Hey, guys,” I said. “Welcome to my new office.”
Alicia gave me a half smile, but Pennington didn’t bother. I invited them to sit down, and they took the reception chairs.
“There’s been a development in this case,” Pennington said, and I felt a sudden chill go down my spine. “Based on the information you got from Ms. Wyatt yesterday, we had officers do a sweep of vacant offices and office buildings within a five minute drive time from where the bomb went off. In one of those buildings, officers found a body.”
I gasped, and my knees buckled. I had to sit down in the chair at the reception desk. “Oh, God,” I said. “Angie?”
“No, it wasn’t Angie,” Alicia said.
“The body they found,” Pennington went on, “was of a young man who fit the description Ms. Wyatt gave of her assailant, right down to the green Lightning Electric uniform. He’d been bludgeoned to death, to the point that his face is completely unrecognizable. There was a metal bar found near the body, and it was covered in blood and other tissues.”
I looked from Pennington to Alicia and back. “Are you thinking Angie beat him to death?”
“We’re not sure,” Pennington said. “The only thing we know at the moment is that there was no sign of Angie Milligan where the body was found. CSI is checking the area for any indication that she or Ms. Wyatt had been there, but it may take a while to get any definitive results.”
I sat there, a dozen thoughts trying to run through my mind at once. “Is it just me,” I asked, “or does this just seem a little too pat? You’ve got a body that seems to fit the description of the bomber but his face has been obliterated, so you can’t get a positive identification out of Marsha. If it really is the same guy, Angie should either be there, or would have escaped and been screaming for help. Did anybody check Angie’s place, to see if maybe she got away and went home?”
“First thing we did,” Pennington said. “She lives alone in an apartment, and there is no sign of her.”
“And no ID on the body?”
“Nothing. We got fingerprints and will be running those through AFIS, but it
’ll take a couple of days minimum to get results back.”
I grinned. “You mean it’s not like they show on TV, where they get a positive identification in fifteen seconds? How much would you bet that when you identify this guy, he’ll turn out to be some local druggie with no connection to St. Mary’s or me?”
“That’s what we’re thinking,” Pennington said. “This looks like a set up, a ringer. Our perp probably paid this guy to put on his clothes, then hit him in the back of the head when he wasn’t looking.”
“He’s trying to make us think he’s dead,” I said. “I just can’t see the sense in it. Do you think he honestly believes you’d just close the case?”
“Yeah, probably,” Alicia said. “By giving us a body that seems to be our suspect, he probably thinks we’ll just be glad he’s gone and give it up.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “This guy is smart enough to build a bomb, he managed to kidnap two women in broad daylight, then he planted another bomb on my car without being seen. He’s no slouch in the brains department, I’m telling you. Doing this, he’s trying to make you think he’s stupid, but he’s not.”
“You could be right,” Pennington said. “And like you said, it still leaves the question of what happened to Angie Milligan. If she had managed to catch him off guard and beat him down, she should have turned up.”
I shook my head. “All this does is make more questions. If we could just figure out what he wants with me, we probably could get a handle on who he is. This is going to drive me crazy.”
Alicia chuckled. “Welcome to our world,” she said.
A thought struck me. “Not that I wasn’t glad to see you guys,” I said, “but why did you come all the way over here to tell me this? A phone call would have been just as effective.”
Pennington looked uncomfortable. “Cassie, to be perfectly honest,” he said, “we needed to see your reaction when we told you. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that you might have identified the suspect and decided to take matters into your own hands.”
I nodded, letting Freda give him her own version of the evil eye. “So you consider me a suspect? I suppose I blew up my own car, too, right?”
“Again, that’s not outside the realm of possibility. If you were the perpetrator, something like that could be a forensic countermeasure designed to throw us off. Even you admit that it was a miracle that you weren’t in the car when he blew it up.”
I looked at Alicia. “Et tu, Brute?” I asked.
Alicia shook her head. “Hey, don’t look at me,” she said. “I told him he was full of crap, but that’s why he wanted me to come along. If he got the feeling that you already knew the guy was dead, he wanted me here to offer a second opinion.”
I looked back at Pennington. “And?”
He grimaced and rolled his eyes. “I don’t really believe you’re involved in this thing,” he said, “at least, not voluntarily. You’re obviously involved, because the perpetrator is deliberately targeting you. He’s got some kind of grudge against you, and I’m not sure it’s related to your work at St. Mary’s at all.”
If he had slapped me in the face with a wet rag, he couldn’t have shocked me more. It hadn’t occurred to me that there could be any other connection; after all, what I did was guaranteed to piss off men, and a lot of them. Every abuse counselor has heard horror stories of vengeful abusers coming after the person they blame for helping their victims get away.
But who else might have a grudge against me? To be honest, I couldn’t think of a single soul.
“Cassie?” Alicia asked. “You okay?”
I shook it off and looked at her. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it just hadn’t occurred to me that somebody might be after me for any other reason. I mean, there are a lot of men out there that probably hate my guts for helping their wives stand up and leave them, you know? If Jim hadn’t said that just now, I wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that this might be about anything else.”
“Have you got some idea what else it could be about?” Pennington asked. “Is there somebody from your past, maybe, that would have a grudge against you?”
I rolled my eye. “The Dalai Lama might never have pissed anyone off, but I’m sure the rest of us have. I think everybody has people who hold grudges against them for one thing or another. I’m trying to think of who it might be in my case, though.”
When I’m really thinking hard, I have a tendency to twirl my hair with my fingers. It’s just a nervous habit, one of those things you do without even thinking about it, but I suddenly caught myself twisting a strand around my index finger. I yanked it out of my hair and looked at Pennington.
“Well, the first things that come to mind are the two cases I solved. The first one was about six months ago, Roger McCoy. He was the man who tried to run off with his stepdaughter into the woods, and when I caught up to him he had killed a deputy sheriff. I ended up using the deputy’s gun to shoot him. The other case was about three months ago, just before Christmas. That was about the two men who were abducting women who had left their abusers. They had caught me, and I killed one of them by dumping a few tons of wooden pallets on him. My boyfriend actually hit the other one with a car, just before he was going to kill me. I suppose either one of those cases might be connected. If Roger or those other guys had family or friends who got angry about them being killed, I guess they might come after me.”
“I had already looked up those cases,” Pennington said. “McCoy has a brother, but he’s at home in Florida. We’re looking up any friends he might’ve had, but most people described him as a loner. Frank and Michael Rawlings, the two kidnappers, don’t seem to have any remaining relatives, and we don’t know about friends just yet. Can you think of anything else that might be connected, any other situation that might make somebody hate you this badly?”
A thought went through my mind, but I shut it down. There was no way I could believe the thing I was thinking.
Speak up, girl, Abby said. You can’t afford to hold anything back, not now. This guy has already killed two people because of you for sure, and you don’t know if Angie is alive or not. You can’t hold anything back.
She was right, even though I hated her for it. “There’s one other possibility that I can think of,” I said. “It goes back to when I…” I waved a hand at my left side. “To when I got burned. My ex-fiancé was a cop, a detective like you. He and three of his buddies were involved in raping and murdering prostitutes, but I have to wonder if there might have been more than just the four of them. If there is another one out there who wasn’t caught, it’s possible he might still be worried that I know something. That would be the biggest motive I could think of for somebody coming after me, but I would think they’d want to shut me up permanently.”
Pennington and Alicia looked at each other, and then looked back at me.
“Cassie,” Pennington said, “did you have any reason to believe there were others involved?”
“No, not directly,” I said. “On the other hand, the reason the city of St. Louis gave me such a big settlement was because they said other police officers had actively worked to conceal evidence that should have gotten those guys caught long before. There were almost a dozen cops who were indicted over that, but I remember my lawyer saying that a few of them were only going to get reprimands.”
“That would definitely be sufficient motive,” Alicia said. She turned to Pennington. “We need to get all over this. We ought to look at the officers who were charged with concealing, as well. Some of them might have gotten light sentences, or probation. Even if they weren’t involved in the murders directly, being convicted of covering it up would’ve ended their careers. That could also be a motive.”
Pennington got to his feet, and Alicia followed. “Cassie,” Pennington said, “you need to be as careful as possible. I’m like you, I think finding that body was just too easy. No matter what reason he had for leaving it for us, our guy is pro
bably still out there, and still seems to be aiming his violence toward you.”
“I know,” I said. “As you can see, though, I’m not that easy to kill.”
Alicia reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “And I want to keep it that way.”
TEN
The news about the body hit the radio around ten thirty, and Dex called me at a quarter to eleven.
“Radio says they found a body that fits the description of the bomber,” he said. “You know about that already?”
“Yeah. Detective Pennington came by, with Alicia Perkins. They told me.”
“You honestly think the dead guy is the one who was behind it?”
See what I mean? Dex sees through things.
“No, and neither do they. It was just too obvious, you know? Alicia thinks the bomber is hoping they’ll think he’s dead and give it up, but I don’t buy it. This guy is too smart for that, so I think he’s just trying to make himself look dumb.”
“That’s pretty much what my gut says. Baby, I don’t like this. I’m thinking about taking some time off, so I can stay beside you.”
“Oh, come on, Dex,” I said. “You said it yourself, I’m tough. On top of that, I’m a survivor; this guy comes near me, I’m either going to arrest him or put a bullet through him, one of the two.”
“Yeah, you’re tough,” he said. “But that only works when you see it coming. I hate to be this blunt, but you’ve only got one eye. That means you got three times as many blind spots as most people.”
“And you want to watch one of them for me? Dex, you took time off to help me with the abduction case. You don’t have any vacation days left, you told me that yourself. You take time off, you might not have a job.”
“So what? I was looking for a job when I found this one. There’s other jobs out there, and I’ve got a damn good reputation as a mechanic.”
“Dex, I…” I stopped. It suddenly occurred to me that Dex was only working so he wouldn’t be dependent on me to support us. He knew how much money I had in the bank, and one of the things I really liked about him was that he didn’t seem intimidated by it. Most men get this macho, alpha-thing going on when their woman makes more money or has more money than they do, but not Dex. He would even let me pay for dinner, sometimes, a clear sign that my money wasn’t freaking him out.
